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On September 10, 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft, English author and feminist (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), mother of Mary Shelley, died of septicaemia at the age of 38. From the article:
"Mary Wollstonecraft (UK: /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/, US: /-kræft/; 27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. Today, Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences. From the article:
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft (UK: /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/, US: /-kræft/; 27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. Today, Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Left-looking half-length portrait of a woman in a white dress
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, c. 1797
Born
27 April 1759
Spitalfields, London, England
Died
10 September 1797 (aged 38)
Somers Town, London, England
Notable work
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Partner
Henry Fuseli (affair)
Gilbert Imlay (affair)
William Godwin (marriage)
Children
Frances "Fanny" Imlay
Mary Shelley
During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.
After Wollstonecraft's death, her widower published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important.
After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38 leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts. She died eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would became an accomplished writer and author of Frankenstein.
Biography
Early life
Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London.[1] She was the second of the seven children of Elizabeth Dixon and Edward John Wollstonecraft.[2] Although her family had a comfortable income when she was a child, her father gradually squandered it on speculative projects. Consequently, the family became financially unstable and they were frequently forced to move during Wollstonecraft's youth.[3] The family's financial situation eventually became so dire that Wollstonecraft's father compelled her to turn over money that she would have inherited at her maturity. Moreover, he was apparently a violent man who would beat his wife in drunken rages. As a teenager, Wollstonecraft used to lie outside the door of her mother's bedroom to protect her.[4] Wollstonecraft played a similar maternal role for her sisters, Everina and Eliza, throughout her life. For example, in a defining moment in 1784, she convinced Eliza, who was suffering from what was probably postpartum depression, to leave her husband and infant; Wollstonecraft made all of the arrangements for Eliza to flee, demonstrating her willingness to challenge social norms. The human costs, however, were severe: her sister suffered social condemnation and, because she could not remarry, was doomed to a life of poverty and hard work.[5]
Two friendships shaped Wollstonecraft's early life. The first was with Jane Arden in Beverley. The two frequently read books together and attended lectures presented by Arden's father, a self-styled philosopher and scientist. Wollstonecraft revelled in the intellectual atmosphere of the Arden household and valued her friendship with Arden greatly, sometimes to the point of being emotionally possessive. Wollstonecraft wrote to her: "I have formed romantic notions of friendship ... I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none."[6] In some of Wollstonecraft's letters to Arden, she reveals the volatile and depressive emotions that would haunt her throughout her life.[7] The second and more important friendship was with Fanny (Frances) Blood, introduced to Wollstonecraft by the Clares, a couple in Hoxton who became parental figures to her; Wollstonecraft credited Blood with opening her mind.[8]
Unhappy with her home life, Wollstonecraft struck out on her own in 1778 and accepted a job as a lady's companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow living in Bath. However, Wollstonecraft had trouble getting along with the irascible woman (an experience she drew on when describing the drawbacks of such a position in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787). In 1780 she returned home, called back to care for her dying mother.[9] Rather than return to Dawson's employ after the death of her mother, Wollstonecraft moved in with the Bloods. She realized during the two years she spent with the family that she had idealized Blood, who was more invested in traditional feminine values than was Wollstonecraft. But Wollstonecraft remained dedicated to her and her family throughout her life (she frequently gave pecuniary assistance to Blood's brother, for example).[10]
Wollstonecraft had envisioned living in a female utopia with Blood; they made plans to rent rooms together and support each other emotionally and financially, but this dream collapsed under economic realities. In order to make a living, Wollstonecraft, her sisters, and Blood set up a school together in Newington Green, a Dissenting community. Blood soon became engaged and after their marriage her husband, Hugh Skeys, took her to Lisbon, Portugal, to improve her health, which had always been precarious.[11] Despite the change of surroundings Blood's health further deteriorated when she became pregnant, and in 1785 Wollstonecraft left the school and followed Blood to nurse her, but to no avail.[12] Moreover, her abandonment of the school led to its failure.[13] Blood's death devastated Wollstonecraft and was part of the inspiration for her first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788).[14]
'The first of a new genus'
Engraving showing a female teacher holding her arms up in the shape of a cross. There is one female child on each side of her, both gazing up at her.
Frontispiece to the 1791 edition of Original Stories from Real Life engraved by William Blake
Mary Wollstonecraft in 1790–91, by John Opie
After Blood's death in 1785, Wollstonecraft's friends helped her obtain a position as governess to the daughters of the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family in Ireland. Although she could not get along with Lady Kingsborough,[15] the children found her an inspiring instructor; Margaret King would later say she 'had freed her mind from all superstitions'.[16] Some of Wollstonecraft's experiences during this year would make their way into her only children's book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788).[17]
Frustrated by the limited career options open to respectable yet poor women—an impediment which Wollstonecraft eloquently describes in the chapter of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters entitled 'Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left Without a Fortune'—she decided, after only a year as a governess, to embark upon a career as an author. This was a radical choice, since, at the time, few women could support themselves by writing. As she wrote to her sister Everina in 1787, she was trying to become 'the first of a new genus'.[18] She moved to London and, assisted by the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson, found a place to live and work to support herself.[19] She learned French and German and translated texts,[20] most notably Of the Importance of Religious Opinions by Jacques Necker and Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann. She also wrote reviews, primarily of novels, for Johnson's periodical, the Analytical Review. Wollstonecraft's intellectual universe expanded during this time, not only from the reading that she did for her reviews but also from the company she kept: she attended Johnson's famous dinners and met such luminaries as the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine and the philosopher William Godwin. The first time Godwin and Wollstonecraft met, they were disappointed in each other. Godwin had come to hear Paine, but Wollstonecraft assailed him all night long, disagreeing with him on nearly every subject. Johnson himself, however, became much more than a friend; she described him in her letters as a father and a brother.[21]
While in London, Wollstonecraft pursued a relationship with the artist Henry Fuseli, even though he was already married. She was, she wrote, enraptured by his genius, 'the grandeur of his soul, that quickness of comprehension, and lovely sympathy'.[22] She proposed a platonic living arrangement with Fuseli and his wife, but Fuseli's wife was appalled, and he broke off the relationship with Wollstonecraft.[23] After Fuseli's rejection, Wollstonecraft decided to travel to France to escape the humiliation of the incident, and to participate in the revolutionary events that she had just celebrated in her recent Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). She had written the Rights of Men in response to the Whig MP Edmund Burke's conservative critique of the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and it made her famous overnight. Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November 1790, and so angered Wollstonecraft that she spent the rest of the month writing her rebuttal. A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke was published on 29 November 1790, initially anonymously;[24] the second edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published on 18 December, and this time the publisher revealed Wollstonecraft as the author.[24]
Wollstonecraft called the French Revolution a 'glorious chance to obtain more virtue and happiness than hitherto blessed our globe'.[25] Against Burke's dismissal of the Third Estate as men of no account, Wollstonecraft wrote, 'Time may show, that this obscure throng knew more of the human heart and of legislation than the profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy'.[25] About the events of 5–6 October 1789, when the royal family was marched from Versailles to Paris by a group of angry housewives, Burke praised Queen Marie Antoinette as a symbol of the refined elegance of the ancien régime, who was surrounded by 'furies from hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women'.[25] Wollstonecraft by contrast wrote of the same event: 'Probably you [Burke] mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education'.[25]
Wollstonecraft was compared with such leading lights as the theologian and controversialist Joseph Priestley and Paine, whose Rights of Man (1791) would prove to be the most popular of the responses to Burke. She pursued the ideas she had outlined in Rights of Men in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her most famous and influential work.[26] Wollstonecraft's fame extended across the English channel, for when the French statesmen Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord visited London in 1792, he visited her, during which she asked that French girls be given the same right to an education that French boys were being offered by the new regime in France.[27]
France
Smoke is billowing throughout the top two-thirds of the picture, dead guards are scattered in the foreground, and a battle with hand-to-hand combat and a horse is in the bottom right.
10 August attack on the Tuileries Palace; French revolutionary violence spreads
Wollstonecraft left for Paris in December 1792 and arrived about a month before Louis XVI was guillotined. Britain and France were on the brink of war when she left for Paris, and many advised her not to go.[28] France was in turmoil. She sought out other British visitors such as Helen Maria Williams and joined the circle of expatriates then in the city.[29] During her time in Paris, Wollstonecraft associated mostly with the moderate Girondins rather than the more radical Jacobins.[30]
On 26 December 1792, Wollstonecraft saw the former king, Louis XVI, being taken to be tried before the National Assembly, and much to her own surprise, found 'the tears flow[ing] insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going to meet death, where so many of his race have triumphed'.[30]
France declared war on Britain in February 1793. Wollstonecraft tried to leave France for Switzerland but was denied permission.[31] In March, the Jacobin-dominated Committee of Public Safety came to power, instituting a totalitarian regime meant to mobilise France for the first 'total war'.
Life became very difficult for foreigners in France.[32] At first, they were put under police surveillance and, to get a residency permit, had to produce six written statements from Frenchmen testifying to their loyalty to the republic. Then, on 12 April 1793, all foreigners were forbidden to leave France.[33] Despite her sympathy for the revolution, life for Wollstonecraft become very uncomfortable, all the more so as the Girondins had lost out to the Jacobins.[33] Some of Wollstonecraft's French friends lost their heads to the guillotine as the Jacobins set out to annihilate their enemies.[33]
Gilbert Imlay, the Reign of Terror, and her first child
Having just written the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was determined to put her ideas to the test, and in the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of the French Revolution, she attempted her most experimental romantic attachment yet: she met and fell passionately in love with Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer. Wollstonecraft put her own principles in practice by sleeping with Imlay even though they were not married, which was unacceptable behavior from a 'respectable' British woman.[33] Whether or not she was interested in marriage, he was not, and she appears to have fallen in love with an idealisation of the man. Despite her rejection of the sexual component of relationships in the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft discovered that Imlay awakened her interest in sex.[34]
Wollstonecraft was to a certain extent disillusioned by what she saw in France, writing that the people under the republic still behaved slavishly to those who held power while the government remained 'venal' and 'brutal'.[32] Despite her disenchantment, Wollstonecraft wrote:
I cannot yet give up the hope, that a fairer day is dawning on Europe, though I must hesitatingly observe, that little is to be expected from the narrow principle of commerce, which seems everywhere to be shoving aside the point of honour of the noblesse [nobility]. For the same pride of office, the same desire of power are still visible; with this aggravation, that, fearing to return to obscurity, after having but just acquired a relish for distinction, each hero, or philosopher, for all are dubbed with these new titles, endeavors to make hay while the sun shines.[32]
Wollstonecraft was offended by the Jacobins' treatment of women. They refused to grant women equal rights, denounced 'Amazons', and made it clear that women were supposed to conform to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideal of helpers to men.[35] On 16 October 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined; among her charges and convictions, she was found guilty of committing incest with her son.[36] Though Wollstonecraft disliked the former queen, she was troubled that the Jacobins would make Marie Antoinette's alleged perverse sexual acts one of the central reasons for the French people to hate her.[35]
As the daily arrests and executions of the Reign of Terror began, Wollstonecraft came under suspicion. She was, after all, a British citizen known to be a friend of leading Girondins. On 31 October 1793, most of the Girondin leaders were guillotined; when Imlay broke the news to Wollstonecraft, she fainted.[36] By this time, Imlay was taking advantage of the British blockade of France, which had caused shortages and worsened ever-growing inflation,[35] by chartering ships to bring food and soap from America and dodge the British Royal Navy, goods that he could sell at a premium to Frenchmen who still had money. Imlay's blockade-running gained the respect and support of some Jacobins, ensuring, as he had hoped, his freedom during the Terror.[37] To protect Wollstonecraft from arrest, Imlay made a false statement to the U.S. embassy in Paris that he had married her, automatically making her an American citizen.[38] Some of her friends were not so lucky; many, like Thomas Paine, were arrested, and some were even guillotined. Her sisters believed she had been imprisoned.
Wollstonecraft called life under the Jacobins 'nightmarish'. There were gigantic daytime parades requiring everyone to show themselves and lustily cheer lest they be suspected of inadequate commitment to the republic, as well as nighttime police raids to arrest 'enemies of the republic'.[33] In a March 1794 letter to her sister Everina, Wollstonecraft wrote:
It is impossible for you to have any idea of the impression the sad scenes I have been a witness to have left on my mind ... death and misery, in every shape of terrour, haunts this devoted country—I certainly am glad that I came to France, because I never could have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded.[33]
Wollstonecraft soon became pregnant by Imlay, and on 14 May 1794 she gave birth to her first child, Fanny, naming her after perhaps her closest friend.[39] Wollstonecraft was overjoyed; she wrote to a friend, 'My little Girl begins to suck so MANFULLY that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R[igh]ts of Woman' (emphasis hers).[40] She continued to write avidly, despite not only her pregnancy and the burdens of being a new mother alone in a foreign country, but also the growing tumult of the French Revolution. While at Le Havre in northern France, she wrote a history of the early revolution, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, which was published in London in December 1794.[41] Imlay, unhappy with the domestic-minded and maternal Wollstonecraft, eventually left her. He promised that he would return to her and Fanny at Le Havre, but his delays in writing to her and his long absences convinced Wollstonecraft that he had found another woman. Her letters to him are full of needy expostulations, which most critics explain as the expressions of a deeply depressed woman, while others say they resulted from her circumstances—a foreign woman alone with an infant in the middle of a revolution that had seen good friends imprisoned or executed.[42]
The fall of the Jacobins and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
In July 1794, Wollstonecraft welcomed the fall of the Jacobins, predicting it would be followed with a restoration of freedom of the press in France, which led her to return to Paris.[33] In August 1794, Imlay departed for London and promised to return soon.[33] In 1793, the British government had begun a crackdown on radicals, suspending civil liberties, imposing drastic censorship, and trying for treason anyone suspected of sympathy with the revolution, which led Wollstonecraft to fear she would be imprisoned if she returned.[31]
The winter of 1794–95 was the coldest winter in Europe for over a century, which reduced Wollstonecraft and her daughter Fanny to desperate circumstances.[43] The river Seine froze that winter, which made it impossible for ships to bring food and coal to Paris, leading to widespread starvation and deaths from the cold in the city.[44] Wollstonecraft continued to write to Imlay, asking him to return to France at once, declaring she still had faith in the revolution and did not wish to return to Britain.[31] After she left France on 7 April 1795, she continued to refer to herself as 'Mrs Imlay', even to her sisters, in order to bestow legitimacy upon her child.[45]
The British historian Tom Furniss called An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution the most neglected of Wollstonecraft's books. It was first published in London in 1794, but a second edition did not appear until 1989.[31] Later generations were more interested in her feminist writings rather than her account of the French Revolution, which Furniss has called her 'best work'.[31] Wollstonecraft was not trained as a historian, but she used all sorts of journals, letters and documents recounting how ordinary people in France reacted to the revolution. She was trying to counteract what Furniss called the 'hysterical' anti-revolutionary mood in Britain, which depicted the revolution as due to the entire French nation's going mad.[31] Wollstonecraft argued instead that the revolution arose from a set of social, economic and political conditions that left no other way out of the crisis that gripped France in 1789.[31]
An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was a difficult balancing act for Wollstonecraft. She condemned the Jacobin regime and the Reign of Terror, but at same time she argued that the revolution was a great achievement, which led her to stop her history in late 1789 rather than write about the Terror of 1793–94.[46] Edmund Burke had ended his Reflections on the Revolution in France with reference to the events of 5–6 October 1789, when a group of women from Paris forced the French royal family from the Palace of Versailles to Paris.[47] Burke called the women 'furies from hell', while Wollstonecraft defended them as ordinary housewives angry about the lack of bread to feed their families.[31] Against Burke's idealised portrait of Marie Antoinette as a noble victim of a mob, Wollstonecraft portrayed the queen as a femme fatale, a seductive, scheming and dangerous woman.[48] Wollstonecraft argued that the values of the aristocracy corrupted women in a monarchy because women's main purpose in such a society was to bear sons to continue a dynasty, which essentially reduced a woman's value to her womb.[48] Moreover, Wollstonecraft pointed out that unless a queen was a queen regnant, most queens were queen consorts, which meant a woman had to exercise influence via her husband or son, encouraging her to become more and more manipulative. Wollstonecraft argued that aristocratic values, by emphasising a woman's body and her ability to be charming over her mind and character, had encouraged women like Marie Antoinette to be manipulative and ruthless, making the queen into a corrupted and corrupting product of the ancien régime.[48]
England and William Godwin
Seeking Imlay, Wollstonecraft returned to London in April 1795, but he rejected her. In May 1795 she attempted to commit suicide, probably with laudanum, but Imlay saved her life (although it is unclear how).[49] In a last attempt to win back Imlay, she embarked upon some business negotiations for him in Scandinavia, trying to recoup some of his losses. Wollstonecraft undertook this hazardous trip with only her young daughter and a maid. She recounted her travels and thoughts in letters to Imlay, many of which were eventually published as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796.[50] When she returned to England and came to the full realization that her relationship with Imlay was over, she attempted suicide for the second time, leaving a note for Imlay:
Let my wrongs sleep with me! Soon, very soon, shall I be at peace. When you receive this, my burning head will be cold ... I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek. God bless you! May you never know by experience what you have made me endure. Should your sensibility ever awake, remorse will find its way to your heart; and, in the midst of business and sensual pleasure, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.[51]"
"Mary Wollstonecraft (UK: /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/, US: /-kræft/; 27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. Today, Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences. From the article:
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft (UK: /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/, US: /-kræft/; 27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. Today, Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and work as important influences.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Left-looking half-length portrait of a woman in a white dress
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, c. 1797
Born
27 April 1759
Spitalfields, London, England
Died
10 September 1797 (aged 38)
Somers Town, London, England
Notable work
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Partner
Henry Fuseli (affair)
Gilbert Imlay (affair)
William Godwin (marriage)
Children
Frances "Fanny" Imlay
Mary Shelley
During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.
After Wollstonecraft's death, her widower published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important.
After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38 leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts. She died eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would became an accomplished writer and author of Frankenstein.
Biography
Early life
Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London.[1] She was the second of the seven children of Elizabeth Dixon and Edward John Wollstonecraft.[2] Although her family had a comfortable income when she was a child, her father gradually squandered it on speculative projects. Consequently, the family became financially unstable and they were frequently forced to move during Wollstonecraft's youth.[3] The family's financial situation eventually became so dire that Wollstonecraft's father compelled her to turn over money that she would have inherited at her maturity. Moreover, he was apparently a violent man who would beat his wife in drunken rages. As a teenager, Wollstonecraft used to lie outside the door of her mother's bedroom to protect her.[4] Wollstonecraft played a similar maternal role for her sisters, Everina and Eliza, throughout her life. For example, in a defining moment in 1784, she convinced Eliza, who was suffering from what was probably postpartum depression, to leave her husband and infant; Wollstonecraft made all of the arrangements for Eliza to flee, demonstrating her willingness to challenge social norms. The human costs, however, were severe: her sister suffered social condemnation and, because she could not remarry, was doomed to a life of poverty and hard work.[5]
Two friendships shaped Wollstonecraft's early life. The first was with Jane Arden in Beverley. The two frequently read books together and attended lectures presented by Arden's father, a self-styled philosopher and scientist. Wollstonecraft revelled in the intellectual atmosphere of the Arden household and valued her friendship with Arden greatly, sometimes to the point of being emotionally possessive. Wollstonecraft wrote to her: "I have formed romantic notions of friendship ... I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none."[6] In some of Wollstonecraft's letters to Arden, she reveals the volatile and depressive emotions that would haunt her throughout her life.[7] The second and more important friendship was with Fanny (Frances) Blood, introduced to Wollstonecraft by the Clares, a couple in Hoxton who became parental figures to her; Wollstonecraft credited Blood with opening her mind.[8]
Unhappy with her home life, Wollstonecraft struck out on her own in 1778 and accepted a job as a lady's companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow living in Bath. However, Wollstonecraft had trouble getting along with the irascible woman (an experience she drew on when describing the drawbacks of such a position in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787). In 1780 she returned home, called back to care for her dying mother.[9] Rather than return to Dawson's employ after the death of her mother, Wollstonecraft moved in with the Bloods. She realized during the two years she spent with the family that she had idealized Blood, who was more invested in traditional feminine values than was Wollstonecraft. But Wollstonecraft remained dedicated to her and her family throughout her life (she frequently gave pecuniary assistance to Blood's brother, for example).[10]
Wollstonecraft had envisioned living in a female utopia with Blood; they made plans to rent rooms together and support each other emotionally and financially, but this dream collapsed under economic realities. In order to make a living, Wollstonecraft, her sisters, and Blood set up a school together in Newington Green, a Dissenting community. Blood soon became engaged and after their marriage her husband, Hugh Skeys, took her to Lisbon, Portugal, to improve her health, which had always been precarious.[11] Despite the change of surroundings Blood's health further deteriorated when she became pregnant, and in 1785 Wollstonecraft left the school and followed Blood to nurse her, but to no avail.[12] Moreover, her abandonment of the school led to its failure.[13] Blood's death devastated Wollstonecraft and was part of the inspiration for her first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788).[14]
'The first of a new genus'
Engraving showing a female teacher holding her arms up in the shape of a cross. There is one female child on each side of her, both gazing up at her.
Frontispiece to the 1791 edition of Original Stories from Real Life engraved by William Blake
Mary Wollstonecraft in 1790–91, by John Opie
After Blood's death in 1785, Wollstonecraft's friends helped her obtain a position as governess to the daughters of the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family in Ireland. Although she could not get along with Lady Kingsborough,[15] the children found her an inspiring instructor; Margaret King would later say she 'had freed her mind from all superstitions'.[16] Some of Wollstonecraft's experiences during this year would make their way into her only children's book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788).[17]
Frustrated by the limited career options open to respectable yet poor women—an impediment which Wollstonecraft eloquently describes in the chapter of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters entitled 'Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left Without a Fortune'—she decided, after only a year as a governess, to embark upon a career as an author. This was a radical choice, since, at the time, few women could support themselves by writing. As she wrote to her sister Everina in 1787, she was trying to become 'the first of a new genus'.[18] She moved to London and, assisted by the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson, found a place to live and work to support herself.[19] She learned French and German and translated texts,[20] most notably Of the Importance of Religious Opinions by Jacques Necker and Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann. She also wrote reviews, primarily of novels, for Johnson's periodical, the Analytical Review. Wollstonecraft's intellectual universe expanded during this time, not only from the reading that she did for her reviews but also from the company she kept: she attended Johnson's famous dinners and met such luminaries as the radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine and the philosopher William Godwin. The first time Godwin and Wollstonecraft met, they were disappointed in each other. Godwin had come to hear Paine, but Wollstonecraft assailed him all night long, disagreeing with him on nearly every subject. Johnson himself, however, became much more than a friend; she described him in her letters as a father and a brother.[21]
While in London, Wollstonecraft pursued a relationship with the artist Henry Fuseli, even though he was already married. She was, she wrote, enraptured by his genius, 'the grandeur of his soul, that quickness of comprehension, and lovely sympathy'.[22] She proposed a platonic living arrangement with Fuseli and his wife, but Fuseli's wife was appalled, and he broke off the relationship with Wollstonecraft.[23] After Fuseli's rejection, Wollstonecraft decided to travel to France to escape the humiliation of the incident, and to participate in the revolutionary events that she had just celebrated in her recent Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). She had written the Rights of Men in response to the Whig MP Edmund Burke's conservative critique of the French Revolution in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and it made her famous overnight. Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on 1 November 1790, and so angered Wollstonecraft that she spent the rest of the month writing her rebuttal. A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke was published on 29 November 1790, initially anonymously;[24] the second edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published on 18 December, and this time the publisher revealed Wollstonecraft as the author.[24]
Wollstonecraft called the French Revolution a 'glorious chance to obtain more virtue and happiness than hitherto blessed our globe'.[25] Against Burke's dismissal of the Third Estate as men of no account, Wollstonecraft wrote, 'Time may show, that this obscure throng knew more of the human heart and of legislation than the profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy'.[25] About the events of 5–6 October 1789, when the royal family was marched from Versailles to Paris by a group of angry housewives, Burke praised Queen Marie Antoinette as a symbol of the refined elegance of the ancien régime, who was surrounded by 'furies from hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women'.[25] Wollstonecraft by contrast wrote of the same event: 'Probably you [Burke] mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education'.[25]
Wollstonecraft was compared with such leading lights as the theologian and controversialist Joseph Priestley and Paine, whose Rights of Man (1791) would prove to be the most popular of the responses to Burke. She pursued the ideas she had outlined in Rights of Men in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her most famous and influential work.[26] Wollstonecraft's fame extended across the English channel, for when the French statesmen Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord visited London in 1792, he visited her, during which she asked that French girls be given the same right to an education that French boys were being offered by the new regime in France.[27]
France
Smoke is billowing throughout the top two-thirds of the picture, dead guards are scattered in the foreground, and a battle with hand-to-hand combat and a horse is in the bottom right.
10 August attack on the Tuileries Palace; French revolutionary violence spreads
Wollstonecraft left for Paris in December 1792 and arrived about a month before Louis XVI was guillotined. Britain and France were on the brink of war when she left for Paris, and many advised her not to go.[28] France was in turmoil. She sought out other British visitors such as Helen Maria Williams and joined the circle of expatriates then in the city.[29] During her time in Paris, Wollstonecraft associated mostly with the moderate Girondins rather than the more radical Jacobins.[30]
On 26 December 1792, Wollstonecraft saw the former king, Louis XVI, being taken to be tried before the National Assembly, and much to her own surprise, found 'the tears flow[ing] insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going to meet death, where so many of his race have triumphed'.[30]
France declared war on Britain in February 1793. Wollstonecraft tried to leave France for Switzerland but was denied permission.[31] In March, the Jacobin-dominated Committee of Public Safety came to power, instituting a totalitarian regime meant to mobilise France for the first 'total war'.
Life became very difficult for foreigners in France.[32] At first, they were put under police surveillance and, to get a residency permit, had to produce six written statements from Frenchmen testifying to their loyalty to the republic. Then, on 12 April 1793, all foreigners were forbidden to leave France.[33] Despite her sympathy for the revolution, life for Wollstonecraft become very uncomfortable, all the more so as the Girondins had lost out to the Jacobins.[33] Some of Wollstonecraft's French friends lost their heads to the guillotine as the Jacobins set out to annihilate their enemies.[33]
Gilbert Imlay, the Reign of Terror, and her first child
Having just written the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was determined to put her ideas to the test, and in the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of the French Revolution, she attempted her most experimental romantic attachment yet: she met and fell passionately in love with Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer. Wollstonecraft put her own principles in practice by sleeping with Imlay even though they were not married, which was unacceptable behavior from a 'respectable' British woman.[33] Whether or not she was interested in marriage, he was not, and she appears to have fallen in love with an idealisation of the man. Despite her rejection of the sexual component of relationships in the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft discovered that Imlay awakened her interest in sex.[34]
Wollstonecraft was to a certain extent disillusioned by what she saw in France, writing that the people under the republic still behaved slavishly to those who held power while the government remained 'venal' and 'brutal'.[32] Despite her disenchantment, Wollstonecraft wrote:
I cannot yet give up the hope, that a fairer day is dawning on Europe, though I must hesitatingly observe, that little is to be expected from the narrow principle of commerce, which seems everywhere to be shoving aside the point of honour of the noblesse [nobility]. For the same pride of office, the same desire of power are still visible; with this aggravation, that, fearing to return to obscurity, after having but just acquired a relish for distinction, each hero, or philosopher, for all are dubbed with these new titles, endeavors to make hay while the sun shines.[32]
Wollstonecraft was offended by the Jacobins' treatment of women. They refused to grant women equal rights, denounced 'Amazons', and made it clear that women were supposed to conform to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideal of helpers to men.[35] On 16 October 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined; among her charges and convictions, she was found guilty of committing incest with her son.[36] Though Wollstonecraft disliked the former queen, she was troubled that the Jacobins would make Marie Antoinette's alleged perverse sexual acts one of the central reasons for the French people to hate her.[35]
As the daily arrests and executions of the Reign of Terror began, Wollstonecraft came under suspicion. She was, after all, a British citizen known to be a friend of leading Girondins. On 31 October 1793, most of the Girondin leaders were guillotined; when Imlay broke the news to Wollstonecraft, she fainted.[36] By this time, Imlay was taking advantage of the British blockade of France, which had caused shortages and worsened ever-growing inflation,[35] by chartering ships to bring food and soap from America and dodge the British Royal Navy, goods that he could sell at a premium to Frenchmen who still had money. Imlay's blockade-running gained the respect and support of some Jacobins, ensuring, as he had hoped, his freedom during the Terror.[37] To protect Wollstonecraft from arrest, Imlay made a false statement to the U.S. embassy in Paris that he had married her, automatically making her an American citizen.[38] Some of her friends were not so lucky; many, like Thomas Paine, were arrested, and some were even guillotined. Her sisters believed she had been imprisoned.
Wollstonecraft called life under the Jacobins 'nightmarish'. There were gigantic daytime parades requiring everyone to show themselves and lustily cheer lest they be suspected of inadequate commitment to the republic, as well as nighttime police raids to arrest 'enemies of the republic'.[33] In a March 1794 letter to her sister Everina, Wollstonecraft wrote:
It is impossible for you to have any idea of the impression the sad scenes I have been a witness to have left on my mind ... death and misery, in every shape of terrour, haunts this devoted country—I certainly am glad that I came to France, because I never could have had else a just opinion of the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded.[33]
Wollstonecraft soon became pregnant by Imlay, and on 14 May 1794 she gave birth to her first child, Fanny, naming her after perhaps her closest friend.[39] Wollstonecraft was overjoyed; she wrote to a friend, 'My little Girl begins to suck so MANFULLY that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R[igh]ts of Woman' (emphasis hers).[40] She continued to write avidly, despite not only her pregnancy and the burdens of being a new mother alone in a foreign country, but also the growing tumult of the French Revolution. While at Le Havre in northern France, she wrote a history of the early revolution, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, which was published in London in December 1794.[41] Imlay, unhappy with the domestic-minded and maternal Wollstonecraft, eventually left her. He promised that he would return to her and Fanny at Le Havre, but his delays in writing to her and his long absences convinced Wollstonecraft that he had found another woman. Her letters to him are full of needy expostulations, which most critics explain as the expressions of a deeply depressed woman, while others say they resulted from her circumstances—a foreign woman alone with an infant in the middle of a revolution that had seen good friends imprisoned or executed.[42]
The fall of the Jacobins and An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
In July 1794, Wollstonecraft welcomed the fall of the Jacobins, predicting it would be followed with a restoration of freedom of the press in France, which led her to return to Paris.[33] In August 1794, Imlay departed for London and promised to return soon.[33] In 1793, the British government had begun a crackdown on radicals, suspending civil liberties, imposing drastic censorship, and trying for treason anyone suspected of sympathy with the revolution, which led Wollstonecraft to fear she would be imprisoned if she returned.[31]
The winter of 1794–95 was the coldest winter in Europe for over a century, which reduced Wollstonecraft and her daughter Fanny to desperate circumstances.[43] The river Seine froze that winter, which made it impossible for ships to bring food and coal to Paris, leading to widespread starvation and deaths from the cold in the city.[44] Wollstonecraft continued to write to Imlay, asking him to return to France at once, declaring she still had faith in the revolution and did not wish to return to Britain.[31] After she left France on 7 April 1795, she continued to refer to herself as 'Mrs Imlay', even to her sisters, in order to bestow legitimacy upon her child.[45]
The British historian Tom Furniss called An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution the most neglected of Wollstonecraft's books. It was first published in London in 1794, but a second edition did not appear until 1989.[31] Later generations were more interested in her feminist writings rather than her account of the French Revolution, which Furniss has called her 'best work'.[31] Wollstonecraft was not trained as a historian, but she used all sorts of journals, letters and documents recounting how ordinary people in France reacted to the revolution. She was trying to counteract what Furniss called the 'hysterical' anti-revolutionary mood in Britain, which depicted the revolution as due to the entire French nation's going mad.[31] Wollstonecraft argued instead that the revolution arose from a set of social, economic and political conditions that left no other way out of the crisis that gripped France in 1789.[31]
An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was a difficult balancing act for Wollstonecraft. She condemned the Jacobin regime and the Reign of Terror, but at same time she argued that the revolution was a great achievement, which led her to stop her history in late 1789 rather than write about the Terror of 1793–94.[46] Edmund Burke had ended his Reflections on the Revolution in France with reference to the events of 5–6 October 1789, when a group of women from Paris forced the French royal family from the Palace of Versailles to Paris.[47] Burke called the women 'furies from hell', while Wollstonecraft defended them as ordinary housewives angry about the lack of bread to feed their families.[31] Against Burke's idealised portrait of Marie Antoinette as a noble victim of a mob, Wollstonecraft portrayed the queen as a femme fatale, a seductive, scheming and dangerous woman.[48] Wollstonecraft argued that the values of the aristocracy corrupted women in a monarchy because women's main purpose in such a society was to bear sons to continue a dynasty, which essentially reduced a woman's value to her womb.[48] Moreover, Wollstonecraft pointed out that unless a queen was a queen regnant, most queens were queen consorts, which meant a woman had to exercise influence via her husband or son, encouraging her to become more and more manipulative. Wollstonecraft argued that aristocratic values, by emphasising a woman's body and her ability to be charming over her mind and character, had encouraged women like Marie Antoinette to be manipulative and ruthless, making the queen into a corrupted and corrupting product of the ancien régime.[48]
England and William Godwin
Seeking Imlay, Wollstonecraft returned to London in April 1795, but he rejected her. In May 1795 she attempted to commit suicide, probably with laudanum, but Imlay saved her life (although it is unclear how).[49] In a last attempt to win back Imlay, she embarked upon some business negotiations for him in Scandinavia, trying to recoup some of his losses. Wollstonecraft undertook this hazardous trip with only her young daughter and a maid. She recounted her travels and thoughts in letters to Imlay, many of which were eventually published as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796.[50] When she returned to England and came to the full realization that her relationship with Imlay was over, she attempted suicide for the second time, leaving a note for Imlay:
Let my wrongs sleep with me! Soon, very soon, shall I be at peace. When you receive this, my burning head will be cold ... I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek. God bless you! May you never know by experience what you have made me endure. Should your sensibility ever awake, remorse will find its way to your heart; and, in the midst of business and sensual pleasure, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.[51]"
Mary Wollstonecraft - Wikipedia
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Thank you, my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on September 10, 1797 English author and feminist (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) Mary Wollstonecraft mother of Mary Shelley, died of septicaemia at the age of 38.
"From 1782 until 1785 Wollstonecraft was a congregant at the Unitarian chapel at Newington Green, during which time she was influenced by its minister, Richard Price. Through her friendship with Dr. Price she entered a circle of intellectuals and radicals, including Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and William Godwin. Between 1788 and 1792 she was a translator and reviewer for publisher Joseph Johnson. Her work frequently appeared in his periodical, Analytical Review. Johnson, a distributor of Unitarian literature, often hosted meetings and dinners that included Paine, Priestley, and Price."
Since she denied the deity of Jesus the Christ it is unlikely she is resting in peace.
Mary Wollstonecraft (In Our Time)
"Melvyn Bragg and guests John Mullan, Karen O'Brien and Barbara Taylor discuss the life and ideas of the pioneering British Enlightenment thinker Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 into a middle-class family whose status steadily sank as her inept, brutal, drunken father frittered away the family fortune. She did what she could to protect her mother from his aggression; meanwhile, her brother was slated to inherit much of the remaining fortune, while she was to receive nothing. From this unpromising but radicalising start, Wollstonecraft's career took a dizzying trajectory through a bleak period as a governess to becoming a writer, launching a polemical broadside against the political star of the day, witnessing the bloodshed of the French Revolution up close, rescuing her lover's stolen ship in Scandanavia, then marrying one of the leading philosophers of the day, William Godwin, and with him having a daughter who - though she never lived to see her grow up - would go on to write Frankenstein. But most importantly, in 1792, she published her great work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which marks her out as one of the great thinkers of the British Enlightenment, with a much stronger, more lasting influence than Godwin. The Vindication was an attempt to apply the Enlightenment logic of rights and reason to the lives of women. Yet it was not a manifesto for the extension of the vote or the reform of divorce law, but a work of political philosophy. And surprisingly, as recent scholarship has highlighted, it was infused with Rational Dissenting Christianity, which Wollstonecraft had absorbed during her time as a struggling teacher and writer in north London. John Mullan is Professor of English at University College, London; Karen O'Brien is Professor of English at the University of Warwick; Barbara Taylor is Professor of Modern History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London."
Images:
1. Mary Wollstonecraft.
2. A Vindication of The Rights of Women - Mary Wollstonecraft.
3. Philosopher William Godwin (portrait by James Northcote) and his wife Feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (portrait by John Opie).
4.
Background from plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/
"Mary Wollstonecraft
First published Wed Apr 16, 2008; substantive revision Fri Aug 19, 2016
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a moral and political philosopher whose analysis of the condition of women in modern society retains much of its original radicalism. One of the reasons her pronouncements on the subject remain challenging is that her reflections on the status of the female sex were part of an attempt to come to a comprehensive understanding of human relations within a civilization increasingly governed by acquisitiveness and consumption. Her first publication was on the education of daughters; she went on to write about politics, history and various aspects of philosophy in a number of different genres that included critical reviews, translations, pamphlets, and novels. Best known for her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her influence went beyond the substantial contribution to feminism she is mostly remembered for and extended to shaping the art of travel writing as a literary genre and, through her account of her journey through Scandinavia, she had an impact on the Romantic movement.
1. Biography
The second of seven children, Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759, in a house in Primrose Street. Her paternal grandfather was a successful master weaver who left a sizeable legacy, but her father, Edward John, mismanaged his share of the inheritance. He tried to establish himself as a gentleman farmer in Epping. This was the first of the family's several moves, each of which marked its financial and social decline. Only Mary's brother, Edward (Ned), was to receive a formal education; he became a lawyer. He had also inherited directly from his grandfather a substantial part of the latter's legacy.
Wollstonecraft's own somewhat haphazard education was, however, not entirely unusual for someone of her sex and position, nor was it particularly deficient. Her published writings show her to have acquired a true command of the Bible and a good knowledge of the works of several of the most famous Ancient philosophers. The latter is partly explained through her personal acquaintance with Thomas Taylor, famed for his translations of Plato. She also drew on a variety of early modern sources, such as Shakespeare and Milton's works. Through her own writing for the Analytical Review she was to become widely read in the literature of her period. Initially, the nature and extent of her reading was partly owed to the friendship shown to her in her youth by a retired clergyman and his wife. Nevertheless, as a woman from an impecunious family, her prospects were very limited. In relatively rapid succession, she was to enter the most likely occupations for someone of her sex and circumstances: a lady's companion, a schoolteacher, and a governess.
In 1778, she was engaged as a companion to a Mrs Dawson and lived at Bath. She returned home to nurse her ailing mother in the latter part of 1781. After Mrs Wollstonecraft's death, in the spring of 1782, Mary lived with the Bloods, the impoverished family of her dearest friend, Fanny. In the winter of 1783, Mary left them in order to attend to her sister Eliza and her newly born daughter. There followed the first of the emotionally very difficult episodes in Mary's life. What prompted Mary to intervene as decisively as she did in her sister's marriage remains somewhat of a mystery; but in the course of January 1784, Mary took her sister away, and the two women went into hiding, leaving Eliza's infant daughter behind; the baby died the following August.
By February of that year, the two sisters had already been planning to establish a school with Fanny Blood. Mary's other sister, Everina, joined in the project a little later. They first set their sights on Islington, then moved to Newington Green, where Mary met the moral and political thinker, the Reverend Richard Price, head of Newington's thriving Dissenting community, and heard him preach. This was a crucial encounter for Mary. Several years later, she was to rise to his defence in a Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and it was through her connections to members of this community that she was to gain an introduction to her future publisher, friend, and one might even say, patron, Joseph Johnson.
In November 1785, Wollstonecraft set off on a trip to Lisbon, where her friend Fanny, who had married that February, was expecting her first child. On board the ship, Mary met a man suffering from consumption; she nursed him for a fortnight, the length of the journey. This experience is related in her first novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788). She gained a very unfavourable opinion of Portuguese life and society, which seemed to her ruled by irrationality and superstitions. Mary's brief stay in Portugal was, furthermore, to be a profoundly unhappy one, for both Fanny and her baby died shortly after the delivery.
On her return to England, Wollstonecraft found her school in a dire state. Far from providing her with a reliable income and some stability, it was to be a source of endless worries and a financial drain. Only Joseph Johnson's advance on her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life (1787) helped ease her considerable financial difficulties. It consists of brief discussions on such topics as ‘Moral Discipline’, ‘Artificial Manners’, ‘Boardings-Schools’, ‘The Benefits Which Arise From Disappointments’, ‘The Observance of Sunday’, and ‘On the Treatment of Servants’.
Following the collapse of her school, Wollstonecraft became a governess to the family of Lord Kingsborough for a brief and unsatisfactory period. The position took her to Ireland, where she completed Mary, A Fiction. On her return to London, Joseph Johnson came to the rescue once again by giving her some literary employment. In 1787, she also began, but never completed, The Cave of Fancy. A Tale. The same year, she wrote Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788); it appeared in two other London editions in her life time (1791 and 1796), the last of which illustrated by William Blake. Wollstonecraft's anthology, The Female Reader; Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse; Selected from the Best Writers and Disposed under Proper Heads; for the Improvement of Young Women (1789), was compiled in the same period and published under the name of ‘Mr. Cresswick, teacher of Elocution’; it pursues themes to be found in her previous works and contains excerpts mostly from the Bible and Shakespeare's plays, as well as many by various eighteenth-century authors, such as Voltaire, Hume, Steele, Charlotte Smith, and Madame de Genlis.
To understand the extent to which Wollstonecraft made up for the lack of a formal education, it is essential to appreciate fully that her talents were to extend to translating and reviewing, and that these two activities, quite apart from her own intellectual curiosity, acquainted her with a great many authors, including Leibniz and Kant. She translated into English Jacques Necker's Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788) from French, Rev. C. G. Salzmann's Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children; with an Introductory Address to Parents (1790) from German, and Madame de Cambon's Young Grandison (1790) from Dutch. In each case, the texts she produced were almost as if her own, not just because she was in agreement with their original authors, but because she more or less re-wrote them. The Reverend Salzmann is unlikely to have resented her for this, as he was to translate into German both A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798).
Throughout the period covered by these translations Wollstonecraft wrote for the Analytical Review, which her publisher, Joseph Johnson, together with Thomas Christie, started in May 1788. She was involved with this publication either as a reviewer or as editorial assistant for most of its relatively short life. Despite her own practice of the genre, her many reviews reveal the degree to which, she, like many other moralists in the eighteenth century, feared the moral consequences of reading novels. She believed that even those of a relatively superior quality encouraged vanity and selfishness. She was to concede, however, that reading such works might nonetheless be better than not reading at all. Besides novels, Wollstonecraft reviewed poetry, travel accounts, educational works, collected sermons, biographies, natural histories, and essays and treatises on subjects such as Shakespeare, happiness, theology, music, architecture and the awfulness of solitary confinement; the authors whose works she commented on, included Madame de Staël, Emanuel Swedenborg, Lord Kames, Rousseau, and William Smellie. Until the end of 1789, her articles were mostly of a moral and aesthetic nature. However in December 1789, she reviewed a speech by her old friend, Richard Price, entitled A Discourse on the Love of our Country, delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution of Great Britain. With an Appendix, containing the report of the Committee of the Society; and Account of the Population of France; and the Declarations of the Rights by the National Assembly of France (1789). This address to the Revolution Society in commemoration of the events of 1688 partly prompted Burke to compose his very famous Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (1790).
Burke's attack on Price in that work in turn led Wollstonecraft, egged on by her publisher, Johnson, to take up her pen in the aged Reverend's defence. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) was almost certainly the first of many responses Burke's Reflections elicited. Initially published anonymously at the end of November, the second edition that quickly followed in mid-December bore its author's name and marked a turning point in her career; it established her a political writer. In September 1791, Wollstonecraft began A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, which elaborated a number of points made in the previous Vindication, namely, that in most cases, marriage was nothing but a property relation, and that the education women received ensured that they could not meet the expectations society had of them and almost certainly guaranteed them an unhappy life.
Following the publication of her second Vindication, Wollstonecraft was introduced to the French statesman and diplomat, Charles Talleyrand, on his mission to London on the part of the Constituent Assembly in February 1792. She dedicated the second edition of the A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to him. In December 1792, she travelled to France where she met Gilbert Imlay, an American merchant and author of A Topographical Descriptions of the Western Territory of North America (1792) and The Emigrants (1793). As British subjects were increasingly at risk under the Terror, Wollstonecraft passed as Imlay's wife so as to benefit from the security enjoyed at the time by American citizens. They never married. Imlay was probably the source of Wollstonecraft's greatest unhappiness, first through his lack of ardour for her, then because of his infidelity, and finally because of his complete rejection of her. Most of all, her love of Imlay brought Wollstonecraft to the realisation that the passions are not so easily brought to heel by reason.
Wollstonecraft had a girl by Imlay. She was born at Le Havre in May 1794 and named Fanny, after Wollstonecraft's friend, Fanny Blood. A year after Fanny's birth, Wollstonecraft twice attempted suicide, first in May, then in October 1795. She broke with Imlay finally in March 1796. In April of the same year, she renewed her acquaintance with William Godwin and they became lovers that summer. They were married at St Pancras church in March 1797. On the 30th August, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, future author of Frankenstein and wife of Shelley, was born.
2. Pedagogical Writings
Apart from Mary, a Fiction and The Cave of Fancy Wollstonecraft's early writings were of a pedagogical nature. These reveal the profound influence John Locke had on Wollstonecraft's thought, and several of the arguments of his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) are echoed in Wollstonecraft's conception of morality and the best manner to inculcate it in individuals at the earliest possible age. The opening paragraph of her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters speaks of the duty parents have to ensure that ‘reason should cultivate and govern those instincts which are implanted in us to render the path of duty pleasant—for if they are not governed they will run wild; and strengthen the passions which are ever endeavouring to obtain dominion—I mean vanity and self-love.’ Similarly, the beginning of her Original Stories from Real Life stated its author's intent, namely to seek ‘to cure those faults by reason, which ought never to have taken root in the infant mind. Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason; but as this task requires more judgement than generally falls to the lot of parents, substitutes must be sought for, and medicines given, when regimen would have answered the purpose better’. Wollstonecraft's prescriptions to counter the deplorable education she thought her contemporaries were inflicting on their children takes the form of a tale about two girls, Mary and Caroline. At the beginning of the story, the reader finds the girls left to the management of ignorant servants (one of Locke's great bugbears), but they are eventually placed under the tuition of a woman of tenderness and discernment. The book shows how the latter succeeds in teaching contemptuous Mary and vain Caroline to avoid anger, exercise compassion, love truth and virtue, and respect the whole of God's creation.
That reason must rule supreme is a running theme of Wollstonecraft's works written prior to her sojourn in Revolutionary France and, all the more, prior to her travels through Scandinavia. It is stressed in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Other continuities between her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and the Vindication include her preference for an education conducted at home, and her insistence that girls and young women be made to acquire ‘inner resources’ so as to make them as psychologically independent as possible. The Thoughts also reveals Wollstonecraft's conviction that universal benevolence is the first virtue, as well as her faith in a providentially ordained universe. She enjoined her readers to prepare their children for ‘the main business of our lives’, namely, the acquisition of virtue, and, unsurprisingly given her own history, she urged parents to strengthen their children's characters so as to enhance their capacity to survive personal tragedies. Self-mastery was thus the aim of education and it was the duty of parents to ensure that their children received it. That mind and body needed to be exercised and shaped so as to face the hardships of life is a running theme in much of her writings.
3. Moral and Political Writings
When Wollstonecraft began to engage in political commentary in reviewing Price's A Discourse on the Love of our Country, she praised him for his account of true patriotism as ‘the result of reason, not the undirected impulse of nature, ever tending to selfish extremes’ as well as his defence of Christianity's prescription of universal benevolence against those who argued such sentiment to be incompatible with the love of one's country. She endorsed his view of liberty of conscience as a sacred right and wrote sympathetically about his plea for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which imposed civil disabilities on Dissenters. She also seemed to support his claim that the political Settlement of 1689 was wanting in that it did not make for full representation of the people and hence made only for partial liberty. Finally, Wollstonecraft reproduced the passage in which Price linked the American and French revolutions and clamoured for the end of despotism throughout Europe.
When not so long thereafter she came to write her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft attacked Edmund Burke for having set upon an harmless elderly preacher in his Reflections; yet her own review justifies Burke's depiction of Price's sermon as inflammatory. Far from thinking that the events taking place in France gave grounds for rejoicing, Burke feared their consequences from the very start. The National Assembly's confiscation of the Church's property, he predicted, would lead to further confiscations, undermine the fundamental right to property, and result in anarchy, which only the rise of a charismatic figure could bring to an end.
Of the many disagreements between Price and Wollstonecraft, on the one hand, and Burke, on the other, one of the deepest was over their respective view of the nature of civil society and of political power in general. The two friends believed that government, the rule of law, and all human relations could be simplified, explicated, and rendered transparent, and both were convinced that this was the task ahead for all lovers of liberty. For Burke, on the contrary, civil society consisted of countless ineffable links between individuals. The latter's relationship to authority was for the most part no less ineffable; moreover, he believed sound political judgement to be the product of experience, and he cautioned prudence. To sweep away established practices and institutions and think of politics as a mere matter of administrating in accordance with a set of abstract rules or rights uninformed by the customs and culture, and hence the national character, of a people was, in his view, to demonstrate a crass disregard for the most obvious facts of human nature and history. Burke's argument led him to dwell on France's financial position in some detail, and he defended its royal family and its Church; he insisted, moreover, that it was already benefiting from a policy of gradual reform. The over-all effect he sought to achieve was to depict his opponent as theoretically confused, politically naive, generally misinformed, and, most damnable of all, his sermon on the Love of our Country with all its affirmation of feelings for humanity proved him to be unpatriotic.
Wollstonecraft's Vindication was the first of many replies. Amongst those that followed was one by Catherine Macaulay, who had influenced Wollstonecraft's pedagogy and was much admired by her. Wollstonecraft's riposte is an interesting and rhetorically powerful work in its own right as well as a necessary introduction to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It consists mostly of a sustained attack on Burke rather than a defence of the rights of man. This is partly because Wollstonecraft took for granted a Lockean conception of God-given rights discoverable by reason, except when the latter was warped by self-love. Wollstonecraft further believed that God made all things right and that the cause of all evil was man. In her view, Burke's Reflections showed its author to be blind to man-made poverty and injustice; this she attributed to his infatuation with rank, Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the English Constitution. Demonstrating her familiarity with Burke's other works and speeches, especially A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and the Speech on Conciliation with America (1775), she also argued that he was inconsistent, if only because of the impossibility, as she saw it, of reconciling his sympathy for the American cause with his reaction to events in France. In this, Wollstonecraft was far from alone and many who had followed Burke's parliamentary career and heard his Speeches to the House of Commons were astonished by what they thought was a radical and inexplicable change of position.
As she was to do in her next and more famous Vindication, Wollstonecraft did not simply clamour for rights, but emphasised that these entail duties; but she also insisted that none could be expected to perform duties whose natural rights were not respected. Furthermore she used David Hume's History of England (1754–62) to contend that England's laws were the product of historical contingency and insisted that only those institutions that could withstand the scrutiny of reason and be shown to be in conformity with natural rights and God's justice merited respect and obedience. There was no question of blanket reverence for the past and its juridical legacy. As for civilization, she thought its progress very uneven and dismissed the culture of politeness and polish as nothing but a screen behind which hypocrisy, egotism and greed festered unchecked. Finally, opposing nature and reason to artifice and politeness, she made herself the true patriot and Burke the fickle Francophile. She was the clear-headed independent thinker, he the emotive creature of a system of patronage. She exhibited manly virtues, he effeminacy.
In the midst of her tirade she turned, rather unexpectedly, to the subject of family life and the limits of parental authority, especially in relation to arranged marriages. She condemned marriages of convenience together with late marriages: both fostered immorality in her view. Indeed, from her perspective, nearly every aspect of the prevailing culture had that consequence, for, in bringing girls up to be nothing but empty headed play-things, parents made for a morally bankrupt society. Such beings could never make dutiful mothers, as they took the horizon to be the eyes of the men they flirted with. The moral depravity of a society devoted to the acquisition of property and its conspicuous display rather than to the pursuit of reason and the protection of natural rights found the means of its reproduction in the family, she contended. Here her dispute was not just with Burke, but implicitly also with Price. In his sermon, he had deplored the sexual depravity of the times that he saw embodied even in those he considered patriots. But to seek only to vindicate the rights of men, as Price had done, was insufficient and misconceived, according to Wollstonecraft. If one sought a truly moral society, the family had to be changed and this, in turn, required a complete change in the nature of the relationship between men and women before, and within, marriage. Only a sound upbringing of both the sexes could secure that. This was the nub of her attack on political theorists and educationalists alike.
When Wollstonecraft came to write The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which she did within a matter of months following the publication of her first overtly political work, the moral rejuvenation of society and the happiness of individual women were woven together. Women were ill-prepared for their duties as social beings and imprisoned in a web of false expectations that would inevitably make them miserable. She wanted women to be transformed into rational and independent beings whose sense of worth came, not from their appearance, but from their inner perception of self-command and knowledge. Women had to be educated; their minds and bodies had to be trained. This would make them good companions, wives, mothers and citizens. Above all it would make them fully human, that is, beings ruled by reason and characterised by self-command. Besides criticisms of existing pedagogical practices and theories, most notably Rousseau's Emile (1762), the Vindication contains many social and political proposals which range from a detailed outline of necessary changes in school curriculum to the suggestion that women be granted not only civil and political rights, but have elected representatives of their own. It argues that women should be taught skills so as to be able to support themselves and their children in widowhood, and never have to marry or remarry out of financial necessity. It seeks to reclaim midwifery for women, against the encroachment of men into this profession, and contends that women could be physicians just as well as nurses. It urges women to extend their interests to encompass politics and the concerns of the whole of humanity. It also contains advice on how to make marriages last. In Wollstonecraft's view, marriages ought to have friendship rather than physical attraction as their basis. Husbands and wives ought not, moreover, to be overly intimate and should maintain a degree of reserve towards each other.
Wollstonecraft wanted women to aspire to full citizenship, to be worthy of it, and this necessitated the development of reason. Rational women would perceive their real duties. They would forgo the world of mere appearances, the world of insatiable needs on which eighteenth-century society was based, as Adam Smith had explained more lucidly than anyone, and of which France was the embodiment, in Wollstonecraft's conception.
That she embraced the social and economic consequences of her vision of happy marriages, based on friendship and producing the next moral generation was spelled out further in her subsequent work, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (1794). In that work, she endeavoured, amongst other things, to assess the merits and demerits of the progress of humanity and establish the causes of French despotism. The picture she drew of ancien régime France was of a country ruled by superstition, and morally and politically degenerate. Borrowing from Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) she had drawn on previously, she sketched a possible future society in which the division of labour would be kept to a minimum and the sexes would be not only educated together but encouraged to work in family units. Single sex institutions and, for instance, all-male workshops encouraged lasciviousness in her view. She thus looked forward to a society in which small businesses and farms would provide basic, instead of superfluous, needs.
Only the combination of her experience of her unrequited love for Imlay, the dictates of her own emotions, and the tribulations of a trip in Northern Europe led her to reconsider her views of reason. Indeed, she was to review her opinion of France, polite culture and manners, even Catholicism which she had abhorred, a loathing that her stay in Portugal had done much to strengthen. The Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), whose influence on travel literature as well as the Romantic movement was by no means negligible, show Wollstonecraft to have begun to espouse a more nuanced view of the world, and to have sought to develop a more fluid account of the relationship between reason and passion, as well as of modernity. Thus she grew a little closer to Burke in that she came to think that the tyranny of commercial wealth might be worse than that of rank and privilege. Whilst in France, she had already begun to write less critically of the English system of government. She had witnessed the Terror, fallen in love, born a child out of wedlock, been rejected, and attempted suicide. A second suicide attempt lay ahead. So did the prospect of happiness with William Godwin, a prospect cut short by her death in childbirth. Posthumous notoriety was to follow as Wollstonecraft became identified only with the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and that work was ironically, in turn, equated with a flouting of social conventions, principally in relation to marriage.
4. Reputation
Although she was very much encouraged by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, she received little support from fellow intellectuals in her lifetime. Even Godwin did not take to her on their first meeting. Very few of the foremost women writers gave Wollstonecraft their wholehearted support in the eighteenth century. Many mocked her, but only very rarely were her ideas genuinely assessed in the way they have come to be since the second half of the twentieth century. The leading poet, Anna Barbauld (1743–1825) was one of the few members of the radical intelligentsia of the time whose opposition to Wollstonecraft was the product of a real engagement with her views on women. By the end of the 1790s and for most of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft was derided by many, if only because of what was deemed to have been a scandalous personal life. There were, to be sure, important exceptions, especially in America. Such praise as she did receive on both sides of the Atlantic came, however, from arguably limited acquaintance with her ideas or her intellectual persona.
And so it seemed that from the end of the century and throughout the next, she who had endeavoured to place marriage on a solid foundation by providing an account of the education that would prepare spouses for it would be primarily thought of as someone who had sought to pass as married when she wasn't and as the mother of an illegitimate child. Much of this reputation was owed to Godwin's frank, arguably unnecessarily frank, account of Wollstonecraft's life, in Memoirs of the Author of a ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1798). It revealed, amongst other personal details, her relationship with Imlay and thereby cast a deep shadow over her reputation. In any event, John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women (1869) was to eclipse most other contributions to feminist debates of the period.
In the twentieth century, and especially following the growth of feminism in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1960s, scholars disregarded the vicissitudes of Wollstonecraft's private life and heralded her as the first English feminist. She came to be read principally within the context of the history of the women's movement. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, however, a growing number of commentators have looked at A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in its historical and intellectual context rather than in isolation or in relation to subsequent feminist theories. This has led to renewed interest in her other political writings, including her Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Wollstonecraft has now long ceased to be seen as just a scandalous literary figure, or just the embodiment of a nascent feminism which only reached maturity two hundred years later, but as an Enlightenment moral and political thinker whose works present a self-contained argument about the kind of change society would need to undergo for men and women to be virtuous in both the private and the public sphere and thereby secure the chance of a measure of happiness.
What is more, with growing interest in reception history, the extent of her influence in Europe and beyond as been the subject of reassessments (Botting 2013). It is becoming increasingly evident that Wollstonecraft was widely read and respected as a pioneer of woman's rights in America as well as many other parts of the world (Botting 2016).
Her reference to slavery and the slave trade as “an atrocious insult to humanity” in Vindication of the Rights of Men, and her call for social justice more generally, has been noted by Amartya Sen in his The Idea of Justice (2009). Often seen as a proponent of liberal values (Sapiro 1992), Wollstonecraft continues also to placed within a republican tradition, most recently by Sandrine Berges (2013), Alan Coffee (2014), and Lena Halldenius (2015), who have analysed her view of freedom in terms of independence and the absence of subordination to the arbitrary power of others.
Whether Wollstonecraft is best seen as belonging to one tradition or any other will remain a matter of dispute. What is important to remember is that she responded to a fast changing political situation and that she continued to engage critically with public opinion, the leading intellectual and political figures of her age, and most remarkably, her own views in the light of her experiences in France, Northern Europe and Great Britain. Her critique of Burke, the English political system, even the aristocracy, became more muted as she found the continued expansion of commerce and growth of the luxury economy to lead to even greater inequities than the world it was replacing.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Listed below are the earliest editions of Wollstonecraft's works, followed by the dates of other editions published in her lifetime, and some later editions of each of the texts. All appear in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, eds., London, Pickering and Chatto, 1989, 7 vols (thereafter cited as Works)
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life. London: Joseph Johnson, 1787.
Mary, A Fiction, London: Joseph Johnson, 1788.
With an introduction by Gina Luria, New York: Garland, 1974.
Original Stories from Real Life: with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness, London: Joseph Johnson, 1788; 1791; 1796. With illustrations by William Blake.
The Female Reader: or Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse: Selected from the Best Writers, and Disposed under Proper Heads: for the Improvement of Young Women, by Mr Creswick, London: Joseph Johnson, 1789.
Edited by Moira Ferguson, Delmar, N.Y.: Scholar's Facsimiles, 1979.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, London: Joseph Johnson, November, 1790 anonymous; December, 1790 bearing Wollstonecraft's authorship.
Edited by Eleanor Louise Nicholes, Gainesville, Florida: Scholar's Facsimiles & Reprints, 1960.
Edited by Janet Todd, in Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and An historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, London: Pickering; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1994.
Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, London: Joseph Johnson, 1792; second edition 1792; reprinted 1796. Second imprint dedicated to M. Talleyrand-Périgord.
Edited by Miriam Brody Kramnick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Edited by Carol H. Poston with reprints of interpretative articles, New York: Norton, 1988.
Edited by Barbara Taylor. London: Everyman, 1992.
Edited by Janet Todd, in Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, An historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, London: Pickering; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1994.
Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has produced in Europe, London: Joseph Johnson, 1794.
Edited by Janet Todd, in Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A vindication of the Rights of Woman, An historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, London: Pickering; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1994.
Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, London: Joseph Johnson, 1796.
Edited by Carol H. Poston, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.
Edited by Richard Holmes, in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of “The Rights of Woman”, London: Penguin, 1987.
Translations by Mary Wollstonecraft
All three works are included in Works.
Of the Importance of Religious Opinions. Translated from the French of Mr. (Jacques) Necker. London: Joseph Johnson, 1788; Dublin, 1788; Philadelphia, 1791.
Elements of Morality for the use of children; with an Introductory Address to Parents. Translated from the German of the Rev. C(hristian) G(otthilf) Salzmann. 2 vols., London: Joseph Johnson, 1790; 3 vols., 1792 with illustrations; first edition reprinted, 1793.
Young Grandison. A Series of Letters from Young Persons to their friends>. Translated from the Dutch of Madame (Maria Geertruida van de Werken) de Cambon. With Alterations and Improvements. 2 vols. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790; Dublin, 1790.
Other works
All included in Works.
Reviews in Analytical Review, 1788–1792, 1796–1797.
“On Poetry and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature”, Monthly Magazine, April, 1797, pp. 279–82.
Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, William Godwin ed., London: Joseph Johnson, 1798.
Posthumous publications
All incomplete and in Works
The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. A Fragment. Begun in 1796.
Extract from the Cave of Fancy. A Tale. Written in 1787.
Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation. Dated 1793.
Fragment of Letters on the Management of Infants.
Lessons.
Hints.
Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli in <A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Other Primary Works of Relevance
The Emigrants, &c., or: The History of an Expatriated Family, Being a Delineation of English Manners, Drawn from Real Character, written in America, by G. Imlay, esq., Dublin: C. Brown, 1794.
Edited by Robert R. Hare as Traditionally ascribed to Gilbert Imlay but, more probably, by MW. Gainesville, Florida: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964.
Other Collections of Wollstonecraft's works
The Memoirs and Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, William Godwin ed., London: Joseph Johnson, 1798.
Gina Luria, ed., (1974) New York: Garlan Press.
A Wollstonecraft Anthology, Janet Todd (ed.), Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977, 1989.
Letters
A selection:
Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, eds., Works, cited above.
Wardle, Ralph, M, ed. 1979, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bibliographies
Sapiro, Virginia, 1992, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Todd, Janet, 1976a, “The biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft”, Signs I (1976), 721–34.
Todd, Janet, 1976b, Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography, New York and London: Garland."
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"From 1782 until 1785 Wollstonecraft was a congregant at the Unitarian chapel at Newington Green, during which time she was influenced by its minister, Richard Price. Through her friendship with Dr. Price she entered a circle of intellectuals and radicals, including Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and William Godwin. Between 1788 and 1792 she was a translator and reviewer for publisher Joseph Johnson. Her work frequently appeared in his periodical, Analytical Review. Johnson, a distributor of Unitarian literature, often hosted meetings and dinners that included Paine, Priestley, and Price."
Since she denied the deity of Jesus the Christ it is unlikely she is resting in peace.
Mary Wollstonecraft (In Our Time)
"Melvyn Bragg and guests John Mullan, Karen O'Brien and Barbara Taylor discuss the life and ideas of the pioneering British Enlightenment thinker Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 into a middle-class family whose status steadily sank as her inept, brutal, drunken father frittered away the family fortune. She did what she could to protect her mother from his aggression; meanwhile, her brother was slated to inherit much of the remaining fortune, while she was to receive nothing. From this unpromising but radicalising start, Wollstonecraft's career took a dizzying trajectory through a bleak period as a governess to becoming a writer, launching a polemical broadside against the political star of the day, witnessing the bloodshed of the French Revolution up close, rescuing her lover's stolen ship in Scandanavia, then marrying one of the leading philosophers of the day, William Godwin, and with him having a daughter who - though she never lived to see her grow up - would go on to write Frankenstein. But most importantly, in 1792, she published her great work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which marks her out as one of the great thinkers of the British Enlightenment, with a much stronger, more lasting influence than Godwin. The Vindication was an attempt to apply the Enlightenment logic of rights and reason to the lives of women. Yet it was not a manifesto for the extension of the vote or the reform of divorce law, but a work of political philosophy. And surprisingly, as recent scholarship has highlighted, it was infused with Rational Dissenting Christianity, which Wollstonecraft had absorbed during her time as a struggling teacher and writer in north London. John Mullan is Professor of English at University College, London; Karen O'Brien is Professor of English at the University of Warwick; Barbara Taylor is Professor of Modern History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London."
Images:
1. Mary Wollstonecraft.
2. A Vindication of The Rights of Women - Mary Wollstonecraft.
3. Philosopher William Godwin (portrait by James Northcote) and his wife Feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (portrait by John Opie).
4.
Background from plato.stanford.edu/entries/wollstonecraft/
"Mary Wollstonecraft
First published Wed Apr 16, 2008; substantive revision Fri Aug 19, 2016
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a moral and political philosopher whose analysis of the condition of women in modern society retains much of its original radicalism. One of the reasons her pronouncements on the subject remain challenging is that her reflections on the status of the female sex were part of an attempt to come to a comprehensive understanding of human relations within a civilization increasingly governed by acquisitiveness and consumption. Her first publication was on the education of daughters; she went on to write about politics, history and various aspects of philosophy in a number of different genres that included critical reviews, translations, pamphlets, and novels. Best known for her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her influence went beyond the substantial contribution to feminism she is mostly remembered for and extended to shaping the art of travel writing as a literary genre and, through her account of her journey through Scandinavia, she had an impact on the Romantic movement.
1. Biography
The second of seven children, Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759, in a house in Primrose Street. Her paternal grandfather was a successful master weaver who left a sizeable legacy, but her father, Edward John, mismanaged his share of the inheritance. He tried to establish himself as a gentleman farmer in Epping. This was the first of the family's several moves, each of which marked its financial and social decline. Only Mary's brother, Edward (Ned), was to receive a formal education; he became a lawyer. He had also inherited directly from his grandfather a substantial part of the latter's legacy.
Wollstonecraft's own somewhat haphazard education was, however, not entirely unusual for someone of her sex and position, nor was it particularly deficient. Her published writings show her to have acquired a true command of the Bible and a good knowledge of the works of several of the most famous Ancient philosophers. The latter is partly explained through her personal acquaintance with Thomas Taylor, famed for his translations of Plato. She also drew on a variety of early modern sources, such as Shakespeare and Milton's works. Through her own writing for the Analytical Review she was to become widely read in the literature of her period. Initially, the nature and extent of her reading was partly owed to the friendship shown to her in her youth by a retired clergyman and his wife. Nevertheless, as a woman from an impecunious family, her prospects were very limited. In relatively rapid succession, she was to enter the most likely occupations for someone of her sex and circumstances: a lady's companion, a schoolteacher, and a governess.
In 1778, she was engaged as a companion to a Mrs Dawson and lived at Bath. She returned home to nurse her ailing mother in the latter part of 1781. After Mrs Wollstonecraft's death, in the spring of 1782, Mary lived with the Bloods, the impoverished family of her dearest friend, Fanny. In the winter of 1783, Mary left them in order to attend to her sister Eliza and her newly born daughter. There followed the first of the emotionally very difficult episodes in Mary's life. What prompted Mary to intervene as decisively as she did in her sister's marriage remains somewhat of a mystery; but in the course of January 1784, Mary took her sister away, and the two women went into hiding, leaving Eliza's infant daughter behind; the baby died the following August.
By February of that year, the two sisters had already been planning to establish a school with Fanny Blood. Mary's other sister, Everina, joined in the project a little later. They first set their sights on Islington, then moved to Newington Green, where Mary met the moral and political thinker, the Reverend Richard Price, head of Newington's thriving Dissenting community, and heard him preach. This was a crucial encounter for Mary. Several years later, she was to rise to his defence in a Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and it was through her connections to members of this community that she was to gain an introduction to her future publisher, friend, and one might even say, patron, Joseph Johnson.
In November 1785, Wollstonecraft set off on a trip to Lisbon, where her friend Fanny, who had married that February, was expecting her first child. On board the ship, Mary met a man suffering from consumption; she nursed him for a fortnight, the length of the journey. This experience is related in her first novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788). She gained a very unfavourable opinion of Portuguese life and society, which seemed to her ruled by irrationality and superstitions. Mary's brief stay in Portugal was, furthermore, to be a profoundly unhappy one, for both Fanny and her baby died shortly after the delivery.
On her return to England, Wollstonecraft found her school in a dire state. Far from providing her with a reliable income and some stability, it was to be a source of endless worries and a financial drain. Only Joseph Johnson's advance on her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life (1787) helped ease her considerable financial difficulties. It consists of brief discussions on such topics as ‘Moral Discipline’, ‘Artificial Manners’, ‘Boardings-Schools’, ‘The Benefits Which Arise From Disappointments’, ‘The Observance of Sunday’, and ‘On the Treatment of Servants’.
Following the collapse of her school, Wollstonecraft became a governess to the family of Lord Kingsborough for a brief and unsatisfactory period. The position took her to Ireland, where she completed Mary, A Fiction. On her return to London, Joseph Johnson came to the rescue once again by giving her some literary employment. In 1787, she also began, but never completed, The Cave of Fancy. A Tale. The same year, she wrote Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations, calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788); it appeared in two other London editions in her life time (1791 and 1796), the last of which illustrated by William Blake. Wollstonecraft's anthology, The Female Reader; Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse; Selected from the Best Writers and Disposed under Proper Heads; for the Improvement of Young Women (1789), was compiled in the same period and published under the name of ‘Mr. Cresswick, teacher of Elocution’; it pursues themes to be found in her previous works and contains excerpts mostly from the Bible and Shakespeare's plays, as well as many by various eighteenth-century authors, such as Voltaire, Hume, Steele, Charlotte Smith, and Madame de Genlis.
To understand the extent to which Wollstonecraft made up for the lack of a formal education, it is essential to appreciate fully that her talents were to extend to translating and reviewing, and that these two activities, quite apart from her own intellectual curiosity, acquainted her with a great many authors, including Leibniz and Kant. She translated into English Jacques Necker's Of the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788) from French, Rev. C. G. Salzmann's Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children; with an Introductory Address to Parents (1790) from German, and Madame de Cambon's Young Grandison (1790) from Dutch. In each case, the texts she produced were almost as if her own, not just because she was in agreement with their original authors, but because she more or less re-wrote them. The Reverend Salzmann is unlikely to have resented her for this, as he was to translate into German both A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798).
Throughout the period covered by these translations Wollstonecraft wrote for the Analytical Review, which her publisher, Joseph Johnson, together with Thomas Christie, started in May 1788. She was involved with this publication either as a reviewer or as editorial assistant for most of its relatively short life. Despite her own practice of the genre, her many reviews reveal the degree to which, she, like many other moralists in the eighteenth century, feared the moral consequences of reading novels. She believed that even those of a relatively superior quality encouraged vanity and selfishness. She was to concede, however, that reading such works might nonetheless be better than not reading at all. Besides novels, Wollstonecraft reviewed poetry, travel accounts, educational works, collected sermons, biographies, natural histories, and essays and treatises on subjects such as Shakespeare, happiness, theology, music, architecture and the awfulness of solitary confinement; the authors whose works she commented on, included Madame de Staël, Emanuel Swedenborg, Lord Kames, Rousseau, and William Smellie. Until the end of 1789, her articles were mostly of a moral and aesthetic nature. However in December 1789, she reviewed a speech by her old friend, Richard Price, entitled A Discourse on the Love of our Country, delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-House in the Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution of Great Britain. With an Appendix, containing the report of the Committee of the Society; and Account of the Population of France; and the Declarations of the Rights by the National Assembly of France (1789). This address to the Revolution Society in commemoration of the events of 1688 partly prompted Burke to compose his very famous Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (1790).
Burke's attack on Price in that work in turn led Wollstonecraft, egged on by her publisher, Johnson, to take up her pen in the aged Reverend's defence. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) was almost certainly the first of many responses Burke's Reflections elicited. Initially published anonymously at the end of November, the second edition that quickly followed in mid-December bore its author's name and marked a turning point in her career; it established her a political writer. In September 1791, Wollstonecraft began A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, which elaborated a number of points made in the previous Vindication, namely, that in most cases, marriage was nothing but a property relation, and that the education women received ensured that they could not meet the expectations society had of them and almost certainly guaranteed them an unhappy life.
Following the publication of her second Vindication, Wollstonecraft was introduced to the French statesman and diplomat, Charles Talleyrand, on his mission to London on the part of the Constituent Assembly in February 1792. She dedicated the second edition of the A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to him. In December 1792, she travelled to France where she met Gilbert Imlay, an American merchant and author of A Topographical Descriptions of the Western Territory of North America (1792) and The Emigrants (1793). As British subjects were increasingly at risk under the Terror, Wollstonecraft passed as Imlay's wife so as to benefit from the security enjoyed at the time by American citizens. They never married. Imlay was probably the source of Wollstonecraft's greatest unhappiness, first through his lack of ardour for her, then because of his infidelity, and finally because of his complete rejection of her. Most of all, her love of Imlay brought Wollstonecraft to the realisation that the passions are not so easily brought to heel by reason.
Wollstonecraft had a girl by Imlay. She was born at Le Havre in May 1794 and named Fanny, after Wollstonecraft's friend, Fanny Blood. A year after Fanny's birth, Wollstonecraft twice attempted suicide, first in May, then in October 1795. She broke with Imlay finally in March 1796. In April of the same year, she renewed her acquaintance with William Godwin and they became lovers that summer. They were married at St Pancras church in March 1797. On the 30th August, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, future author of Frankenstein and wife of Shelley, was born.
2. Pedagogical Writings
Apart from Mary, a Fiction and The Cave of Fancy Wollstonecraft's early writings were of a pedagogical nature. These reveal the profound influence John Locke had on Wollstonecraft's thought, and several of the arguments of his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) are echoed in Wollstonecraft's conception of morality and the best manner to inculcate it in individuals at the earliest possible age. The opening paragraph of her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters speaks of the duty parents have to ensure that ‘reason should cultivate and govern those instincts which are implanted in us to render the path of duty pleasant—for if they are not governed they will run wild; and strengthen the passions which are ever endeavouring to obtain dominion—I mean vanity and self-love.’ Similarly, the beginning of her Original Stories from Real Life stated its author's intent, namely to seek ‘to cure those faults by reason, which ought never to have taken root in the infant mind. Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason; but as this task requires more judgement than generally falls to the lot of parents, substitutes must be sought for, and medicines given, when regimen would have answered the purpose better’. Wollstonecraft's prescriptions to counter the deplorable education she thought her contemporaries were inflicting on their children takes the form of a tale about two girls, Mary and Caroline. At the beginning of the story, the reader finds the girls left to the management of ignorant servants (one of Locke's great bugbears), but they are eventually placed under the tuition of a woman of tenderness and discernment. The book shows how the latter succeeds in teaching contemptuous Mary and vain Caroline to avoid anger, exercise compassion, love truth and virtue, and respect the whole of God's creation.
That reason must rule supreme is a running theme of Wollstonecraft's works written prior to her sojourn in Revolutionary France and, all the more, prior to her travels through Scandinavia. It is stressed in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Other continuities between her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and the Vindication include her preference for an education conducted at home, and her insistence that girls and young women be made to acquire ‘inner resources’ so as to make them as psychologically independent as possible. The Thoughts also reveals Wollstonecraft's conviction that universal benevolence is the first virtue, as well as her faith in a providentially ordained universe. She enjoined her readers to prepare their children for ‘the main business of our lives’, namely, the acquisition of virtue, and, unsurprisingly given her own history, she urged parents to strengthen their children's characters so as to enhance their capacity to survive personal tragedies. Self-mastery was thus the aim of education and it was the duty of parents to ensure that their children received it. That mind and body needed to be exercised and shaped so as to face the hardships of life is a running theme in much of her writings.
3. Moral and Political Writings
When Wollstonecraft began to engage in political commentary in reviewing Price's A Discourse on the Love of our Country, she praised him for his account of true patriotism as ‘the result of reason, not the undirected impulse of nature, ever tending to selfish extremes’ as well as his defence of Christianity's prescription of universal benevolence against those who argued such sentiment to be incompatible with the love of one's country. She endorsed his view of liberty of conscience as a sacred right and wrote sympathetically about his plea for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which imposed civil disabilities on Dissenters. She also seemed to support his claim that the political Settlement of 1689 was wanting in that it did not make for full representation of the people and hence made only for partial liberty. Finally, Wollstonecraft reproduced the passage in which Price linked the American and French revolutions and clamoured for the end of despotism throughout Europe.
When not so long thereafter she came to write her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft attacked Edmund Burke for having set upon an harmless elderly preacher in his Reflections; yet her own review justifies Burke's depiction of Price's sermon as inflammatory. Far from thinking that the events taking place in France gave grounds for rejoicing, Burke feared their consequences from the very start. The National Assembly's confiscation of the Church's property, he predicted, would lead to further confiscations, undermine the fundamental right to property, and result in anarchy, which only the rise of a charismatic figure could bring to an end.
Of the many disagreements between Price and Wollstonecraft, on the one hand, and Burke, on the other, one of the deepest was over their respective view of the nature of civil society and of political power in general. The two friends believed that government, the rule of law, and all human relations could be simplified, explicated, and rendered transparent, and both were convinced that this was the task ahead for all lovers of liberty. For Burke, on the contrary, civil society consisted of countless ineffable links between individuals. The latter's relationship to authority was for the most part no less ineffable; moreover, he believed sound political judgement to be the product of experience, and he cautioned prudence. To sweep away established practices and institutions and think of politics as a mere matter of administrating in accordance with a set of abstract rules or rights uninformed by the customs and culture, and hence the national character, of a people was, in his view, to demonstrate a crass disregard for the most obvious facts of human nature and history. Burke's argument led him to dwell on France's financial position in some detail, and he defended its royal family and its Church; he insisted, moreover, that it was already benefiting from a policy of gradual reform. The over-all effect he sought to achieve was to depict his opponent as theoretically confused, politically naive, generally misinformed, and, most damnable of all, his sermon on the Love of our Country with all its affirmation of feelings for humanity proved him to be unpatriotic.
Wollstonecraft's Vindication was the first of many replies. Amongst those that followed was one by Catherine Macaulay, who had influenced Wollstonecraft's pedagogy and was much admired by her. Wollstonecraft's riposte is an interesting and rhetorically powerful work in its own right as well as a necessary introduction to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It consists mostly of a sustained attack on Burke rather than a defence of the rights of man. This is partly because Wollstonecraft took for granted a Lockean conception of God-given rights discoverable by reason, except when the latter was warped by self-love. Wollstonecraft further believed that God made all things right and that the cause of all evil was man. In her view, Burke's Reflections showed its author to be blind to man-made poverty and injustice; this she attributed to his infatuation with rank, Queen Marie-Antoinette, and the English Constitution. Demonstrating her familiarity with Burke's other works and speeches, especially A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and the Speech on Conciliation with America (1775), she also argued that he was inconsistent, if only because of the impossibility, as she saw it, of reconciling his sympathy for the American cause with his reaction to events in France. In this, Wollstonecraft was far from alone and many who had followed Burke's parliamentary career and heard his Speeches to the House of Commons were astonished by what they thought was a radical and inexplicable change of position.
As she was to do in her next and more famous Vindication, Wollstonecraft did not simply clamour for rights, but emphasised that these entail duties; but she also insisted that none could be expected to perform duties whose natural rights were not respected. Furthermore she used David Hume's History of England (1754–62) to contend that England's laws were the product of historical contingency and insisted that only those institutions that could withstand the scrutiny of reason and be shown to be in conformity with natural rights and God's justice merited respect and obedience. There was no question of blanket reverence for the past and its juridical legacy. As for civilization, she thought its progress very uneven and dismissed the culture of politeness and polish as nothing but a screen behind which hypocrisy, egotism and greed festered unchecked. Finally, opposing nature and reason to artifice and politeness, she made herself the true patriot and Burke the fickle Francophile. She was the clear-headed independent thinker, he the emotive creature of a system of patronage. She exhibited manly virtues, he effeminacy.
In the midst of her tirade she turned, rather unexpectedly, to the subject of family life and the limits of parental authority, especially in relation to arranged marriages. She condemned marriages of convenience together with late marriages: both fostered immorality in her view. Indeed, from her perspective, nearly every aspect of the prevailing culture had that consequence, for, in bringing girls up to be nothing but empty headed play-things, parents made for a morally bankrupt society. Such beings could never make dutiful mothers, as they took the horizon to be the eyes of the men they flirted with. The moral depravity of a society devoted to the acquisition of property and its conspicuous display rather than to the pursuit of reason and the protection of natural rights found the means of its reproduction in the family, she contended. Here her dispute was not just with Burke, but implicitly also with Price. In his sermon, he had deplored the sexual depravity of the times that he saw embodied even in those he considered patriots. But to seek only to vindicate the rights of men, as Price had done, was insufficient and misconceived, according to Wollstonecraft. If one sought a truly moral society, the family had to be changed and this, in turn, required a complete change in the nature of the relationship between men and women before, and within, marriage. Only a sound upbringing of both the sexes could secure that. This was the nub of her attack on political theorists and educationalists alike.
When Wollstonecraft came to write The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which she did within a matter of months following the publication of her first overtly political work, the moral rejuvenation of society and the happiness of individual women were woven together. Women were ill-prepared for their duties as social beings and imprisoned in a web of false expectations that would inevitably make them miserable. She wanted women to be transformed into rational and independent beings whose sense of worth came, not from their appearance, but from their inner perception of self-command and knowledge. Women had to be educated; their minds and bodies had to be trained. This would make them good companions, wives, mothers and citizens. Above all it would make them fully human, that is, beings ruled by reason and characterised by self-command. Besides criticisms of existing pedagogical practices and theories, most notably Rousseau's Emile (1762), the Vindication contains many social and political proposals which range from a detailed outline of necessary changes in school curriculum to the suggestion that women be granted not only civil and political rights, but have elected representatives of their own. It argues that women should be taught skills so as to be able to support themselves and their children in widowhood, and never have to marry or remarry out of financial necessity. It seeks to reclaim midwifery for women, against the encroachment of men into this profession, and contends that women could be physicians just as well as nurses. It urges women to extend their interests to encompass politics and the concerns of the whole of humanity. It also contains advice on how to make marriages last. In Wollstonecraft's view, marriages ought to have friendship rather than physical attraction as their basis. Husbands and wives ought not, moreover, to be overly intimate and should maintain a degree of reserve towards each other.
Wollstonecraft wanted women to aspire to full citizenship, to be worthy of it, and this necessitated the development of reason. Rational women would perceive their real duties. They would forgo the world of mere appearances, the world of insatiable needs on which eighteenth-century society was based, as Adam Smith had explained more lucidly than anyone, and of which France was the embodiment, in Wollstonecraft's conception.
That she embraced the social and economic consequences of her vision of happy marriages, based on friendship and producing the next moral generation was spelled out further in her subsequent work, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (1794). In that work, she endeavoured, amongst other things, to assess the merits and demerits of the progress of humanity and establish the causes of French despotism. The picture she drew of ancien régime France was of a country ruled by superstition, and morally and politically degenerate. Borrowing from Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) she had drawn on previously, she sketched a possible future society in which the division of labour would be kept to a minimum and the sexes would be not only educated together but encouraged to work in family units. Single sex institutions and, for instance, all-male workshops encouraged lasciviousness in her view. She thus looked forward to a society in which small businesses and farms would provide basic, instead of superfluous, needs.
Only the combination of her experience of her unrequited love for Imlay, the dictates of her own emotions, and the tribulations of a trip in Northern Europe led her to reconsider her views of reason. Indeed, she was to review her opinion of France, polite culture and manners, even Catholicism which she had abhorred, a loathing that her stay in Portugal had done much to strengthen. The Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), whose influence on travel literature as well as the Romantic movement was by no means negligible, show Wollstonecraft to have begun to espouse a more nuanced view of the world, and to have sought to develop a more fluid account of the relationship between reason and passion, as well as of modernity. Thus she grew a little closer to Burke in that she came to think that the tyranny of commercial wealth might be worse than that of rank and privilege. Whilst in France, she had already begun to write less critically of the English system of government. She had witnessed the Terror, fallen in love, born a child out of wedlock, been rejected, and attempted suicide. A second suicide attempt lay ahead. So did the prospect of happiness with William Godwin, a prospect cut short by her death in childbirth. Posthumous notoriety was to follow as Wollstonecraft became identified only with the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and that work was ironically, in turn, equated with a flouting of social conventions, principally in relation to marriage.
4. Reputation
Although she was very much encouraged by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, she received little support from fellow intellectuals in her lifetime. Even Godwin did not take to her on their first meeting. Very few of the foremost women writers gave Wollstonecraft their wholehearted support in the eighteenth century. Many mocked her, but only very rarely were her ideas genuinely assessed in the way they have come to be since the second half of the twentieth century. The leading poet, Anna Barbauld (1743–1825) was one of the few members of the radical intelligentsia of the time whose opposition to Wollstonecraft was the product of a real engagement with her views on women. By the end of the 1790s and for most of the nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft was derided by many, if only because of what was deemed to have been a scandalous personal life. There were, to be sure, important exceptions, especially in America. Such praise as she did receive on both sides of the Atlantic came, however, from arguably limited acquaintance with her ideas or her intellectual persona.
And so it seemed that from the end of the century and throughout the next, she who had endeavoured to place marriage on a solid foundation by providing an account of the education that would prepare spouses for it would be primarily thought of as someone who had sought to pass as married when she wasn't and as the mother of an illegitimate child. Much of this reputation was owed to Godwin's frank, arguably unnecessarily frank, account of Wollstonecraft's life, in Memoirs of the Author of a ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1798). It revealed, amongst other personal details, her relationship with Imlay and thereby cast a deep shadow over her reputation. In any event, John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women (1869) was to eclipse most other contributions to feminist debates of the period.
In the twentieth century, and especially following the growth of feminism in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1960s, scholars disregarded the vicissitudes of Wollstonecraft's private life and heralded her as the first English feminist. She came to be read principally within the context of the history of the women's movement. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, however, a growing number of commentators have looked at A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in its historical and intellectual context rather than in isolation or in relation to subsequent feminist theories. This has led to renewed interest in her other political writings, including her Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Wollstonecraft has now long ceased to be seen as just a scandalous literary figure, or just the embodiment of a nascent feminism which only reached maturity two hundred years later, but as an Enlightenment moral and political thinker whose works present a self-contained argument about the kind of change society would need to undergo for men and women to be virtuous in both the private and the public sphere and thereby secure the chance of a measure of happiness.
What is more, with growing interest in reception history, the extent of her influence in Europe and beyond as been the subject of reassessments (Botting 2013). It is becoming increasingly evident that Wollstonecraft was widely read and respected as a pioneer of woman's rights in America as well as many other parts of the world (Botting 2016).
Her reference to slavery and the slave trade as “an atrocious insult to humanity” in Vindication of the Rights of Men, and her call for social justice more generally, has been noted by Amartya Sen in his The Idea of Justice (2009). Often seen as a proponent of liberal values (Sapiro 1992), Wollstonecraft continues also to placed within a republican tradition, most recently by Sandrine Berges (2013), Alan Coffee (2014), and Lena Halldenius (2015), who have analysed her view of freedom in terms of independence and the absence of subordination to the arbitrary power of others.
Whether Wollstonecraft is best seen as belonging to one tradition or any other will remain a matter of dispute. What is important to remember is that she responded to a fast changing political situation and that she continued to engage critically with public opinion, the leading intellectual and political figures of her age, and most remarkably, her own views in the light of her experiences in France, Northern Europe and Great Britain. Her critique of Burke, the English political system, even the aristocracy, became more muted as she found the continued expansion of commerce and growth of the luxury economy to lead to even greater inequities than the world it was replacing.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Listed below are the earliest editions of Wollstonecraft's works, followed by the dates of other editions published in her lifetime, and some later editions of each of the texts. All appear in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, eds., London, Pickering and Chatto, 1989, 7 vols (thereafter cited as Works)
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life. London: Joseph Johnson, 1787.
Mary, A Fiction, London: Joseph Johnson, 1788.
With an introduction by Gina Luria, New York: Garland, 1974.
Original Stories from Real Life: with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness, London: Joseph Johnson, 1788; 1791; 1796. With illustrations by William Blake.
The Female Reader: or Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse: Selected from the Best Writers, and Disposed under Proper Heads: for the Improvement of Young Women, by Mr Creswick, London: Joseph Johnson, 1789.
Edited by Moira Ferguson, Delmar, N.Y.: Scholar's Facsimiles, 1979.
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, London: Joseph Johnson, November, 1790 anonymous; December, 1790 bearing Wollstonecraft's authorship.
Edited by Eleanor Louise Nicholes, Gainesville, Florida: Scholar's Facsimiles & Reprints, 1960.
Edited by Janet Todd, in Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and An historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, London: Pickering; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1994.
Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, London: Joseph Johnson, 1792; second edition 1792; reprinted 1796. Second imprint dedicated to M. Talleyrand-Périgord.
Edited by Miriam Brody Kramnick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Edited by Carol H. Poston with reprints of interpretative articles, New York: Norton, 1988.
Edited by Barbara Taylor. London: Everyman, 1992.
Edited by Janet Todd, in Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, An historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, London: Pickering; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1994.
Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect it has produced in Europe, London: Joseph Johnson, 1794.
Edited by Janet Todd, in Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A vindication of the Rights of Woman, An historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, London: Pickering; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1994.
Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, London: Joseph Johnson, 1796.
Edited by Carol H. Poston, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.
Edited by Richard Holmes, in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of “The Rights of Woman”, London: Penguin, 1987.
Translations by Mary Wollstonecraft
All three works are included in Works.
Of the Importance of Religious Opinions. Translated from the French of Mr. (Jacques) Necker. London: Joseph Johnson, 1788; Dublin, 1788; Philadelphia, 1791.
Elements of Morality for the use of children; with an Introductory Address to Parents. Translated from the German of the Rev. C(hristian) G(otthilf) Salzmann. 2 vols., London: Joseph Johnson, 1790; 3 vols., 1792 with illustrations; first edition reprinted, 1793.
Young Grandison. A Series of Letters from Young Persons to their friends>. Translated from the Dutch of Madame (Maria Geertruida van de Werken) de Cambon. With Alterations and Improvements. 2 vols. London: Joseph Johnson, 1790; Dublin, 1790.
Other works
All included in Works.
Reviews in Analytical Review, 1788–1792, 1796–1797.
“On Poetry and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature”, Monthly Magazine, April, 1797, pp. 279–82.
Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, William Godwin ed., London: Joseph Johnson, 1798.
Posthumous publications
All incomplete and in Works
The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. A Fragment. Begun in 1796.
Extract from the Cave of Fancy. A Tale. Written in 1787.
Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation. Dated 1793.
Fragment of Letters on the Management of Infants.
Lessons.
Hints.
Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli in <A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Other Primary Works of Relevance
The Emigrants, &c., or: The History of an Expatriated Family, Being a Delineation of English Manners, Drawn from Real Character, written in America, by G. Imlay, esq., Dublin: C. Brown, 1794.
Edited by Robert R. Hare as Traditionally ascribed to Gilbert Imlay but, more probably, by MW. Gainesville, Florida: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964.
Other Collections of Wollstonecraft's works
The Memoirs and Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, William Godwin ed., London: Joseph Johnson, 1798.
Gina Luria, ed., (1974) New York: Garlan Press.
A Wollstonecraft Anthology, Janet Todd (ed.), Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977, 1989.
Letters
A selection:
Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, eds., Works, cited above.
Wardle, Ralph, M, ed. 1979, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bibliographies
Sapiro, Virginia, 1992, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Todd, Janet, 1976a, “The biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft”, Signs I (1976), 721–34.
Todd, Janet, 1976b, Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography, New York and London: Garland."
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